Carl Hiaasen

• Born: March 12, 1953
• Place of Birth: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

• TYPES OF PLOT: Comedy caper; amateur sleuth; private investigator

Contribution

Carl Hiaasen is noted for creating a distinctive landscape filled with Florida’s social, political, and environmental issues and ills. His fictional world is populated by an array of bizarre cliché-flouting characters, from reporters who become reluctant investigators to ludicrously grotesque villains and environmental avengers such as a former governor and ecological fanatic turned Everglades hermit. Within his world, Hiaasen creates wildly absurdist situations laced with his own particular humor while reflecting a strong environmental consciousness. His years as an investigative reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald have given him a keen insight into Florida’s ills, which he attacks in his novels. His investigative reporting has won many significant awards and finalist status for the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, and his novels, which combine sociopolitical satire, dark humor, broad slapstick, and environmental criticism, have achieved a critical and popular following and appear in bookstores nationwide. His distinctive style, themes, and satiric wit, which he uses to call attention to corporate greed, government corruption, and the destruction of his beloved Florida wilderness, offer a black-comedy world not yet rivaled by other authors of crime and detective fiction. Like , Hiaasen has taken crime fiction into the mainstream by subverting old formulas with matters of social and environmental importance. His place in the canon of contemporary authors seems assured.

Biography

The son of a lawyer and a teacher, Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in South Florida. Having received his first typewriter at an early age, he forged a satirical voice by publishing an underground newsletter in high school. Hiaasen married Connie Lyford in 1970, attended Emory University, where he submitted satiric pieces to the school newspaper, and then transferred to the University of Florida, graduating with a journalism degree in 1974. After beginning his writing career at Cocoa Today (now Florida Today), he joined the Miami Herald in 1976 and gained recognition as an investigative reporter. As a reporter, he has focused on developments and projects that threaten Florida’s ecology and natural beauty for the sake of profit. He became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on doctors committing malpractice in 1980 and for a series on drug smuggling in 1981. In 1985, Hiaasen began writing a weekly column known to irritate regional developers and bureaucrats, who blame him for discouraging tourism. For his journalism and commentary advocating the preservation of Florida’s ecology, Hiaasen received the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club in 2003-2004, the 1980 Newspaper Guild’s Heywood Broun Award, and honors from the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2010, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists awarded him the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award.

Hiaasen began writing fiction in 1981 when he and William D. Montalbano (a former Miami Herald editor) collaborated to write three novels drawing on their experience as reporters and relying on detective and adventure fiction formulas. In 1986, the author ventured out on his own with Tourist Season and has continued to write mystery and detective fiction as well as novels for young adults and nonfiction. His novels reflect his offbeat imagination and satirical comic sense and are infused with social and political awareness, often centering on South Florida environmental concerns. Beginning in 1987, his fiction became more socially pointed and comical: He wrote, for example, of corruption in the fishing world (Double Whammy, 1987); corrupt plastic surgeons and feckless lawyers (Skin Tight, 1989); dishonest, ecology-destroying landowners (Native Tongue, 1991), and greed and iniquity in the wake of a devastating hurricane (Stormy Weather, 1995). Deviating from his normal mode in 1996, he joined with twelve other authors to write Naked Came the Manatee, an absurdly fast-paced mystery originally published in serial form in the Miami Herald’s magazine section, which brought together noted characters associated with each author.

In 1998, Hiaasen focused on the Walt Disney Company, describing with wild humor the company’s international aspirations in the nonfictional Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. In 1999, Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen appeared, followed by Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen (2001), The Downhill Lie (2008), Dance of the Reptiles: Selected Columns (2014), and Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear (2018).

After Sick Puppy (2000) and Basket Case (2002), two more novels featuring Hiaasen’s distinctive humor and convoluted crime situations, he wrote his first novel for the young-adult market, Hoot (2002). It won the Newberry Honor for excellence in children’s literature. The story deals with the danger facing burrowing owls owing to greedy land developers. A second young adult novel, Flush (2005), dealt with illegal sewage dumping off the Florida coast. The author’s 2006 comic caper, Nature Girl, introduced within his socially conscious agenda such zany characters as a bipolar heroine intent on improving the world, a hapless telemarketer, and a Seminole failed alligator wrestler. His further works include Razor Girl (2016), Squeeze Me (2020), Squirm (2018), and Wrecker (2023). Like his journalism, Hiaasen's novels earned numerous awards, including the 2017 Marjorie Harris Carr Award for Environmental Advocacy from the Florida Defenders of the Environment.

Hiaasen was divorced from his first wife in 1996; his son from that marriage worked as a newspaper reporter. Hiaasen married Fenia Clizer in 1999 and settled with her and their son in the Florida Keys. Hiaasen’s fiction mirrors his passion as an environmentally concerned Floridian and journalist.

Analysis

As an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, Carl Hiaasen focused on the corruption in the business world and in politics that negatively affected the Florida environment. The issues and the people that served as fodder for his columns are fictionalized in his novels, forming the basis for outlandish characters and situations. The novels that Hiaasen coauthored with fellow journalist William B. Montalbano are conventional works of detective and action fiction encompassing such subjects as the cocaine trade, smuggling, and murder on foreign soil. These novels do not have the characteristics that make Hiaasen’s later work noteworthy. Hiaasen introduced his distinctive style and themes in his first solo novel, Tourist Season. Claiming that Florida produces stories and people as bizarre as those in his novels, Hiaasen created a distinctive genre of comedy mysteries, also described as environmental thrillers, which hold a world of outsized ecology-destroying crooks and promoters, greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, obtuse tourists, confused retirees, hard-luck rednecks, and crazed ecoteurs. The writer views this world with a sardonic eye and a wildly absurdist wit that stings any who, by thought or deed, threatens the environment in South Florida or who, in any way, deceives their fellow citizens.

Hiaasen's protagonists who stand against crooked schemers include journalists who have become amateur detectives, former state investigators turned fishermen, a private investigator, and occasionally a woman. Usually, central characters, after dealing with absurdly outlandish complications, are successful in preventing bad guys from achieving their unlawful, often anti-environmental ends, and they frequently contribute to such villains meeting an outrageously funny demise, such as a hit man impaled on a stuffed swordfish.

Tourist Season

Hiaasen’s first solo novel, Tourist Season, allowed him to give full rein to his offbeat humor and imagination. A group of fanatic but inept activists want to rid Florida of all perceived problems by terrorizing its tourists and developers. Tourists are kidnapped, thrown into a pool, and awarded freedom if they can swim across it without being eaten by the resident alligator—but none make it. A local politician’s body is discovered in a suitcase with a toy alligator in his throat, and an Orange Bowl Queen is kidnapped during a game by one of the terrorists, who is a former Miami Dolphins football star. The leader of the militant environmentalists is Skip Wiley, a former columnist for the Miami Herald whose lawless, militant measures probably represent many of Hiaasen’s own fantasies. Protagonist Brian Keyes, a reporter turned private investigator, eventually solves the mystery, saves the Orange Bowl Queen, and confronts the eco-terrorist leader before the latter is blown up on an island rezoned for dynamiting. The last act of the wounded leader before the island explodes is to climb a tree to put a nested eagle to flight.

Double Whammy

The comic mystery Double Whammy combines Florida landscape overdevelopment with a story of rigged big-money bass-fishing tournaments. Protagonist R. J. Decker, a news photographer turned private detective, is hired to investigate wrongdoing on the bass-fishing circuit. Decker enlists the help of a deranged hermit named Clinton “Skink” Tyree, a former Florida governor who idealism caused him to vacate his office when the surrounding corruption became unbearable and to flee into the swamp where he ate roadkill and became a prankster-ecoterrorist. Skink is a wildly bizarre figure who appears in three other Hiaasen novels (Sick Puppy, Native Tongue, and Stormy Weather) but becomes more of a teacher-helper than avenger. In Double Whammy, Decker and Skink discover nefarious connections among bass-fishing tournaments, television shows, an outdoor Christian network, and an evangelist real-estate developer who has built his newest lake-and-town project on a polluted landfill that will not sustain aquatic life. The novel also includes a macabre murderer who threatens victims by carrying a pit bull’s severed head locked onto his arm. Critical comments praise the writing style and macabre-funny aspects of the plot, and a sports magazine has commended Hiaasen’s comprehensive knowledge of the cheating schemes plaguing fishing tournaments as well as the political corruption depriving Florida of much of its wetlands.

Native Tongue

Hiaasen, for the source of his plot in Native Tongue, again turns to such South Florida issues as multiple theme parks, endangered species, and overdevelopment. The hero, Joe Winder, is a burned-out newspaperman reduced to being a public relations hack for a Disney World–like theme park in the Florida Keys. The park is owned by a mobster in the federal Witness Protection Program who wants to further develop Key Largo by bulldozing land and erecting condominiums and golf courses. However, his plans fall apart when two endangered mango voles, part of a popular park exhibit, disappear and Winder and former governor Skink conspire to thwart his plans. The intrigue culminates in the park’s burning down and the landscape’s being temporarily undisturbed. The ruthless developer is ultimately killed by a hit man as a result of his past organized crime connections. However, the novel’s most outlandish villain is a chief of security so reliant on steroids that he drags an intravenous infusion set along with him. Although he menaces Winder, he meets a perverse fate by drowning in a water tank while being sodomized by the park’s performing dolphin. Most reviewers found the novel inventive, satirically rich, and convincing in conveying an environmental message.

Strip Tease

The first Hiaasen novel to make the best-seller list, Strip Tease, is perhaps the best known owing to its adaptation as a motion picture in 1996 with Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. However, more significantly, it marks Hiaasen’s first woman protagonist. Erin Grant is a well-realized and sympathetic character who dances at a topless club to make enough money to gain custody of her child from her former husband, a petty thief specializing in stolen wheelchairs. When an unbalanced politician develops an unhealthy attraction to Erin, he sets in motion a chain of events that end in murder. The novel encompasses corrupt politicians controlled by ruthless sugar-industry magnates with Cuban interests and touches on custody battles and feminist concerns about women forced to strip to earn a living. The villains are less comic than in preceding novels, yet blackly humorous elements are not lacking. Among them is a widely known congressman slathered head to foot in Vaseline, death by a golf club, and the mad search for a snake to replace the deceased prop of one stripper. The novel, superior to its screen adaptation, is an effective indictment of the powerful sugar lobby wrapped in a black comedy about upscale strip clubs.

Skinny Dip

In this screwball Florida escapade treating antienvironmental crooks, villain Chaz Perrone, an inept, shady marine scientist hopes to make a fast buck by doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue to illegally dump fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Perrone suspects that his wife, Joey, has learned about his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner in the Atlantic. However, unbeknown to him, his wife survives the fall by clinging to a bale of Jamaican pot and is pulled from the ocean by Mick Stranahan, a retired investigator for the Florida State Attorney’s Office who is now a loner fisherman in a waterfront bungalow. Mick, making a second appearance as a Hiaasen protagonist (the first was in Skin Tight), persuades Joey not to immediately report her husband’s crime to the police, but instead to play dead and with Mick’s help to bedevil Perrone until he incriminates himself and gives away his scam. Joey proceeds to taunt and haunt her homicidal husband, whose nerves become so frayed that his work suffers. His erratic behavior causes his cohorts in pollution to grow uneasy. Meanwhile, Mick finds that despite six failed marriages and island solitude, he is still capable of romance. Mick and Joey, as a team, survive and overcome attacks from the villains, exact revenge on Perrone, and affectionately find each other. The story is an engaging, amusing, and satirical romp with ever-present Hiaasen environmental themes. More than a few critics have noted that the novel marks the author at the top of his comic form and brings back an appealing protagonist who may well appear again.

Bibliography

Brannon, Julie Sloan. “The Rules Are Different Here: South Florida Noir and the Grotesque.” In Crime Fiction and Film in the Sunshine State, edited by Steve Glassman and Maurice O’Sullivan. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997.

“Carl Hiaasen.” Current Biography Yearbook 1997, edited by Elizabeth A. Schick. Wilson, 1997.

Grunwald, Michael. “Swamp Things.” The New Republic, 15 Nov. 2004, pp. 33–37.

Gulddal, Jesper, and Stewart King. "World Crime Fiction." The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Routledge, 2022, pp. 285–93.

Hiaasen, Carl. Carl Hiaasen, www.carlhiaasen.com. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford UP, 2005.

Nyberg, Ramesh. “Murder, Mayhem and Mirth: An Interview with Carl Hiaasen.” Writer’s Digest, vol. 75, Jan. 1995, pp. 38–40.

Rzepka, Charles J., and Lee Horsley. A Companion to Crime Fiction. John Wiley & Sons, 2020.